Neoplatonism

NEOPLATONISM

NEOPLATONISM. Early modern Neoplatonism was a complex, syncretic phenomenon. It revived the thought of late antiquity but had deep roots too in the Greek Fathers, in medieval Augustinian spirituality, and in late scholastic Aristotelianism; it was also indebted to the Plato-Aristotle controversy among Renaissance Byzantines, notably to the speculative (and probably heretical) ideas of George Gemistos Pletho. Keyed to the revival of interest in, and renewed access to, Plato's texts that began with such early fifteenth-century humanists as the Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni, it culminated in the work of four distinguished if very different philosopher-theologians: the Greek émigré Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), the German conciliarist Cardinal Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464), the Florentine cathedral canon, scholar, and teacher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), and his "fellow Platonist," the eclectically brilliant Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola (1463–1494), who ended his brief life as a devout follower of Savonarola.

Strictly speaking, Neoplatonism is the Platonism that originated with Plato's monistic third-century interpreter, Plotinus, and that attained its most scholastic elaboration in the work of the fifth-century Proclus. Dominated by metaphysical concerns, it was based on Plato's middle and later dialogues, preeminently the Parmenides, Timaeus, Sophist, Philebus, Republic, and Phaedrus, and on passages and arguments elsewhere, particularly in the Symposium, that addressed these concerns. From the onset, however, Plotinus and his followers claimed to be expounding not only Plato's Platonism but also the doctrines that Plato had learned from Pythagorean teachers, themselves the inheritors of proto-Platonic doctrines from the remotest Orphic, Egyptian, and Persian-Chaldaean pasts. All this came to be thought of by the Renaissance Neoplatonists as an ancient theology, a perennial gentile wisdom, bestowed and sanctioned by God, that was parallel to, and consonant with, the wisdom revealed to the Hebrews via Moses and the prophets, and that had been perfected in Christ, the new Zoroaster, the new Orpheus, the new Plato. This was not simply a declaration of faith. They could turn to the opening of St. John's Gospel and his First Epistle with their meditations on the descent of the Word, to various passages in St. Paul's Epistles, and above all to the treatises of one Dionysius the Areopagite, whom they identified with St. Paul's Athenian disciple (mentioned in Acts 17:34), but who was, we now realize, a late fifth- or early sixth-century follower of Proclus. These treatises incorporated many features of Proclus' Neoplatonic scholasticism, and propounded a dialectical theology centered on negation and analogy that was deeply indebted to the late ancient Neoplatonic interpretation of the second part of Plato's Parmenides. But their misdating to the first century had the dramatic effect of making St. Paul a Proclian Neoplatonist, and his teaching on the Hill of Mars, an exposition of the mysteries of Plato's supreme exercise in dialectic.

Other misdatings or misattributions—the notion for instance that Plotinus had been taught by a Christian, Ammonius Saccas, and had been a fellow disciple of the Christian Origen—helped to establish Christ and his disciples as the perfection of Platonism, and to validate Neoplatonism as the Christian philosophy. The seal to this interpretation was Augustine's acknowledgment of the role played by "certain books of the Platonists"—in all likelihood Marius Victorinus' Latin translations of extracts from Plotinus—in his reconversion to Christianity. Thus Augustine and the Areopagite, the two thinkers who had laid the foundations of medieval theology, were made central to the story of Christian Neoplatonism. Finally, to complicate matters still further, when the study of Aristotle was revived in the West in the thirteenth century, some of his governing notions had already been partially Neoplatonized by ancient commentators such as Themistius, and by Arab misattributions and mistranslations. Variously incorporated into Thomism and Scotism, these hybrids (the notion of participation is an example) persisted into the early modern period, despite scholarly controversy and elucidation. Additionally, parts of Proclus' works were already known in the medieval period (and were rendered into Latin), while those of Plato and Plotinus remained essentially unknown except for the first half of the Timaeus and the lemmata in Proclus' commentaries; this ensured a Proclian take on many issues that also persisted. It was a tangled situation that obviously lent itself to the revival of the ancient search for a Neoplatonic subordination of Aristotle to Plato, and of both to Christianity.

This was largely the work of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). Earlier humanists had already translated some of the dialogues, including the Republic, into Latin, but Ficino published the definitive Neoplatonic rendering of the entire canon in 1484 and went on to translate Plotinus' Enneads and a number of other dependent texts, and to furnish them with extensive, penetrating commentary. An original philosopher, teacher, medical theorist, and priest, he embraced the missionary goal of Neoplatonizing Christianity. In particular he argued on Neoplatonic grounds for the soul's immortality in the hope both of strengthening the faith of the intellectual elite and of initiating them into the mysteries (the psychology) of the soul's ascent into mind, into unity, into the highest of all metaphysical principles, the One. This captured the imagination of influential secular and religious figures, patrons, and artists throughout Europe, especially in Italy, France, and Hungary (though whether he was ever the head of a Platonic academy in Florence in any sense other than a circle of friends and admirers is doubtful). His arguments in Platonic Theology (1482) even contributed to the soul's immortality being declared an article of faith at the Lateran Council in 1512.

Though Jacopo Mazzoni and Francesco Patrizi eventually occupied newly created chairs of Platonic philosophy, Neoplatonism never managed to supplant the entrenched Aristotelianism of the universities, even as it attracted influential academic support in France, and eventually in England with such mid-seventeenth-century Platonists as Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. In fact, Ficino's Neoplatonized Latin Plato and Plotinus translations continued to be used well into the nineteenth century (we have Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notes, for instance, on Ficino's Plato); and they contributed to the revival of an interest in Plato's later metaphysics among German philosophers and theologians such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Neoplatonism's greatest impact, however, was on several speculative thinkers outside of, or merely on the fringes of, the universities. These included most notably Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Robert Fludd, men who were variously interested in magic, demonology, the occult, mystical mathematics, harmony and love theory, medical astrology, and the notions of the World Soul and of an ensouled nature. Such a rich medley of interests also accounted, predictably, for Neoplatonism's eclipse during the Enlightenment, and for the often harsh dismissal by historians like Johann Jakob Brucker of its Renaissance proponents. By the same token, the Romantics rediscovered in it a mystical, at times even a pantheistic, tradition that was opposed not so much to Cartesian rationalism as to scientific empiricism, and that had heretical if not explicitly anti-Christian aspects. Arguably indeed Plotinus and Neoplatonism had a profounder impact on early modern Europe, directly and by way of opposition, than the "pure" Plato and the dialogues themselves; certainly a non-Neoplatonic appreciation of the latter only peaked after the educational reforms of the nineteenth century had made an understanding and appreciation of Greek literary prose—the early and middle dialogues are wonderful examples—an integral part of the establishment's patrician education. Even so, poets and theologians continued to turn to Plotinus and his followers, as did a few scholars haunted by the possibility that they were in truth Plato's most luminous interpreters.

See also Cambridge Platonists ; Moral Philosophy and Ethics ; Philosophy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Michael J. B. Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation. Florence, 1998.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Translated by James P. Pettegrove. Edinburgh, 1953.

Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt. Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford and New York, 1992.

Hankins, James. Plato in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Leiden and New York, 1991.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought and its Sources. Edited by Michael Mooney. New York, 1979.

Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella. London, 1958.

Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Rev. ed. New York, 1968.

Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London, 1964.

Michael J. B. Allen